Welcome to the NKU General Botany Project (Bio 313 & 313L, Spring 2022)
Welcome to our General Botany iNaturalist project! This site should serve as a great place for us to share observations of neat plants that we see and to learn more about diversity of plants and plant-like organisms.
On the topic of plant-like organisms, the mysterious strings of tiny, greenish cells that everyone saw in their Loch Norse water samples today turned out to be cyanobacteria. Dr. Cooper thinks they are in the genus Dolichospermum. The cells looked splotchy not because they have organelles like chloroplasts (they're prokaryotic, so they don't) but because they have aerotopes (little gas-filled areas) to help them float. After all, if you need to photosynthesize, it helps to be near the surface of the water where there's lots of sun. You can also see the occasional round, clear cell mixed in to the strand. Like we saw in our Nostoc samples, these are heterocysts, where the colony fixes nitrogen.
I took photos and posted the observation to our project, so it's there for reference. Don't forget, there are lots of iNaturalist projects that include neat photos of pond water organisms. Explore a little and try searching on terms like "algae", "pond water", or "diatoms".
Comentarios
Agregar un comentario